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Opera for Android is out, but I think I’ll stick to Chrome for now

Opera made a lot of people angry earlier this year when they said they were going to stop working on their own web rendering engine and instead switch to WebKit. Personally, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I always thought it was an incredible waste of resources to have brilliant minds working on two separate projects, making each incrementally better, instead of combining efforts to really move the ball forward for the engine that powers almost everything.

Shortly after Opera made that announcement, Google announced they were going to fork WebKit and work on their own engine called Blink. Don’t be worried though, Opera said they’re basically going to follow Google, which brings me to today’s news.

Opera for Android is now out of beta, and it’s based on WebKit, but a later version will be based on Blink. What’s important here is that it has Opera’s user interface, which some people like. I installed the new app to give it a go, and I immediately had issues. Several sites I visited rendered zoomed in for no apparent reason. And scrolling just wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked it to be. I even made it crash when loading a web page with an embedded video.

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lalala

Main reason I’m sticking to Chrome is it syncs with the pc chrome.

Hotzigetty

Second Paragraph – “today’s new.”

Stefan Constantinescu

Thanks, fixed!

jmcomms

While I will still use Opera mini when travelling (to keep data costs down), I am pretty much ready to ditch Opera on my Mac as it is now so unstable that it quits far too regularly when accessing even relatively plain sites. It doesn’t make me want me to even try any new version of Opera on mobile, and looking at the many complaints on the Opera forums, I am sure many others will be gradually put off and seek another option. Maybe the PC version is far more stable, but no matter how many updates I get, how many ‘back to factory’ resets I do, Opera is and probably always will be unstable.

And as I now use Chrome (Beta) on Android, which also introduces data compression, having my bookmarks and history synced and passwords etc is actually even better than Opera Link so I am now trying to get used to having Chrome as my default browser on my iMac, MacBook Air and ancient Windows netbook.

As more people get Android devices, I suspect that no matter what Opera does, more and more people will simply stick with Chrome as installed by default, and then switch their other devices to Chrome.

What I will miss is the awesome speed dials feature, and even the notes (although I should really have moved all of these to Evernote years ago!).

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